Literally: these days, at seven or eight, rarely later than nine, I am up and out of bed, mind abuzz with thoughts I can’t help but spill readily onto the page. Fourth journal this year, the pale lavender A5 Leuchtturm, 120gsm, and the 0.35mm Uniball One J bought for me at the Kinokuniya next to Bryant Park. Pen stumbling over itself, practically falling flat on my face with the velocity of thought, and then into my ever-mud-encrusted pink running shoes, down the stairs and onto the treadmill, body like a lever I pull to bear me ceaselessly into the day. The morning light so white and half-hearted, coy lover come to perch on my windowsill at long last. Me and San Francisco: unsteady still around each other, her salt breeze whipping against the gait of my sun-browned limbs, both of us filling the negative space left by the body of the other.
It feels like a breakup the way I decide to stop applying to computer jobs for the time being. Sure, we had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot from being committed to them for a few years, but maybe it’s time to date around a little and discover the parts of me I lost during that relationship? Trusting that when it’s right to reach out again, I’ll know. Loosed from my moorings, I clutch for that which will tie me to the texture of living. Little details which matter so much: carrying the little punk rocker girl figurine C brought back from China for me, keeping it in my crossbody bag during the whole move up from south Bay to make it all easier somehow. Listening to the pretty girl at the REI explain their rewards program just to hear her talk. Wearing good cashmere for no reason at all, just to sit at the coffeeshop a block and a half from our place and listen to A talk about their breakup. Touchpoints, all of them.
On a whim I throw a past, present, future tarot spread on our bed, the night before the move. Looking for clarity on my career; where I am; where I’m going. I can’t help but laugh when I see the cards:
Even as a tarot novice, I’m able to make sense of the past and the future cards. The spread spans the ace of cups to the king of cups: cups being the suit of emotions, ace signalling beginnings and king signalling endings. It feels like being hit over the head with a sledgehammer—the question I think is about my career has its roots all gnarled up in my feelings. But how? And how do I read the present card, the three of pentacles?
R gives me a couple of puzzle pieces with strong explanatory power. First, that the three of pentacles can be read as concerning collaboration. Particularly, in the deck I’m using, the Smith-Waite, the card depicts a day laborer, an architect, and a priest working together to construct a church, with the three pentacles (the star-like symbols) arranged in a triangle, that most architecturally sound of shapes. Second, that the reversed (upside-down) cards can be read as concerning internal, rather than external life.
So the story goes like this: moving from the strong but unsophisticated emotions of my childhood, I go through a period of negotiating competing internal desires, ultimately ending in a place of emotional wisdom that finally manifests externally after significant internal work. By some alchemy of the cards themselves, and reading them in collaboration with a friend who knows well what I’m going through, I feel touched and comforted. What is merely a piece of plastic laying on a bedsheet laying on a mattress on the floor—bedframe disassembled in a whirlwind around the emptying room—takes on a knot of emotional significance I carry with me like a little candle. That one day I might reign, maybe not sovereign, but suzerain, over my emotions, cup easy in the hand.
I realize that I really do want to be king of cups. I’m reminded of the little black box theater piece J invited us to day of—I said yes, no hesitation, not at all like how I was even a year or two ago—where a group of just five friends put on thirty plays in sixty minutes. In one of them, they took turns pouring sand into differently sized plastic cups, puncturing each others’ cups and their own alike, taping over the puncture wounds, sand flying haphazardly all over the stage. Something deeply anxious trembling in the air, the clock ticking down the allotted two minutes, and sand pouring, watching them sabotage and care for each other. What obligations do we have to fill each others’ cups? Our own? And is there a lawless realm in which obligations fade and we act only on instinct? And can we call this realm love?
In the ache of my world being thrown off-kilter, with the move, and the reorientation away from software jobs, I am often thrust into the day to day, the rushing current of life which fills my nostrils and makes me choke under the pressure. That balcony in Bushwick on a perfect late July evening. The hot line of a lovely stranger’s arm, hipbone, thigh pressed against mine. Long lashes, deep brown eyes. The quiet part of the party, fairy lights braided loosely over the wrought iron balustrade, and my friend drunkenly relating some story about a missing engagement ring, me nearly sobbing with laughter. The morning after, I listen to him read from the Quran, bathed in the melodic baritone croon of his Arabic. He tells me how the idea of deliverance has been increasingly central in his life, talks about fasting all day, the ache of hunger salved at sunset.
In my Artist’s Way bookclub, I describe my life like a Rothko printed inch by inch—swimming in black, and hoping for a shot of red, like a revelation. The punchline which makes it all make sense, and retroactively colors the waiting with romantic significance. That I might be able to gaze upon my life at the end like the way I behold Rothkos now, nearly in tears, pinned to the spot by their devastating, awesome gravity. My mother has been convinced for many years that the rapture is coming any time now; I remember in high school, she used to press little business cards into my hand reading THE TIME IS NOW for me to give to my friends. I can be disdainful of her at the same time I keep the faith, in my own strange, sacrilegious way.